acceptance I never expected it to do so. I knew the book to be an
expression of idiosyncrasy, and no man knows how much or how little
his idiosyncrasy is in harmony with the temper of his time, until his
book has been given to the world. It was the story of _Aylwin_
that was born of the speculations upon Love and Death; it was not the
speculations that were pressed into the story; without these
speculations there could have been no story to tell. Indeed the chief
fault which myself should find with _Aylwin_, if my business
were to criticise it, would be that it gives not too little but too
much prominence to the strong incidents of the story--a story written
as a comment on love's warfare with death--written to show that
confronted as a man is every moment by signs of the fragility and
brevity of human life, the great marvel connected with him is not
that his thoughts dwell frequently upon the unknown country beyond
Orion where the beloved dead are loving us still, but that he can
find time and patience to think upon anything else--a story written
further to show how terribly despair becomes intensified when a man
has lost--or thinks he has lost--a woman whose love was the only
light of his world--when his soul is torn from his body, as it were,
and whisked off on the wings of the 'viewless winds' right away
beyond the farthest star, till the universe hangs beneath his feet a
trembling point of twinkling light, and at last even this dies away
and his soul cries out for help in that utter darkness and
loneliness.

It was to depict this phase of human emotion that both _Aylwin_
and its sequel, _The Coming of Love_, were written. They were
missives from the lonely watch-tower of the writer's soul, sent out
into the strange and busy battle of the world--sent out to find, if
possible, another soul or two to whom the watcher was, without